I've cut out any drama or other unhelpful stuff from my reply here, I thought about really getting into it and had started a post to that end but it's not really helpful and would just distract for no good end really.
If I was wrong or came across as too forceful or demanding I apologize, I obviously don't think I was doing so but let's just not get back into that now as it wouldn't be useful to any disussion. I'm just making some observations and possible suggestions here, use them or not as you will.
So... moving on...
45°38'N-13°47'E;12227145 said:
Ok, but you've not answered my question; how would "fresh water health" help cities that don't have fresh water?
It would help in the specific game I had going where I had 5 cities in my entire 40+ city empire not founded on fresh water. What can I say, the random map generator smiled on me that game as I had abundant rivers and small lakes dotted all over the place. It was a quick fix to solve a temp issue, nothing more as I never overchop as I like lumbermills but really this is getting off point. I still think the underlying issue is that the mod has too many sickness causing "things", you clearly don't agree. So be it.
I've already answered you here: they work, but they don't work as you think they do. You don't like these features? Turn them off... there are people who actually like these features, other people who dislike them simply don't use them. That's why they were made as options
So, what option will turn off invulnrable 1st ring and city tile culture? No sarcasm, no rancor. Please educate me - how do I get back city flipping and 1st ring city tile cultural fights like you see all the time in the base game as I've never ever seen them in all the time using this mod despite whatever settings I choose or whatever you want to say to the contrary.
As I said, there are people actually liking this option. I suppose it can be improved as you suggest but I don't know how long it will take because I'm not sure what part of the code needs to be changed. FYI anyway I get asked very often in my games if I want city X join Y empire because they feel more attracted to that empire than to mine. Then I get a chance to choose. I can choose to let that city go or I can choose to hold it (and eventually pay the consequences if I don't take care of the problem).
Oh I see now, you don't know how to turn this off. Disapointing, not to mention giving me a strong urge just to delete this mod altogether right now given how awful I think this "feature" is... sigh. Needless to say, I do hope you can look into how this can be changed back to the default game behavior at some point as this little item ruins a huge part of the game.
Btw on your last point, I'll say it again - never EVER seen it a single time. No culture wars at all over 1st ring and city tile culture as far as I can tell with this mod active. No revolts, no requests to join my empire, no unrest, just nothing at all. What settings you are using vs what I'm using that prevents this, I'd really like to know.
I've done another test, it was my mistake before: it looks like I've no problem in building igloos or Snow Castle. Can you please upload your savegame related to that screenshot? It could be something related to some other game option. Thank you.
I don't have that game anymore the screenshot came from I'm afraid. I've restarted and abandoned numerous games since I've started using this mod for the reasons I've mentioned before so I periodically clean out my saves folder of older games. If I see it happen again I'll be sure to make sure I document it and get a save game uploaded for you.
So, with that out of the way... my suggestions / observations / comments part 2.
16. Religions seem rather unbalanced with a few being obviously better choices to try and found vs others. Hellenism and Taoism with their free/special unit promotions especially seem objectively better than some of the plain jane others with no special benefits of their own. Yeah it's a kind of strategic choice but I seriously doubt the AI considers these kinds of things in their research paths. Some of the religion-restricted wonders and abilities are strong as I said above, others are very weak/non-existant so from a strategic balancing on which one(s) you're trying to found it doesn't make the choices too hard to make I've found.
17. Civics are a mess, full stop. Overly complicated at times, out of left field for some of the bonuses and penalties at others, and occasionally completely useless and never ever a good choice that a player would actually want to use at still other times. I can see it already has a thread and disussion going on issues with them however so I'll leave it to that place. They do need work I think it goes without saying, I may perhaps add in some specific comments in that thread.
18. Some of the new random events are a real kick in the face and downright unfair in their frequency. The mercenaries one in particular is insane. I got it 6 times in a row in a game I had awhile back, not kidding or exagerating in the least. Some of these events were only 3 or 4 turns apart which is just "oh F-off RNG" time for me - open up WB and delete that crap that spawns in the middle of my empire on the one unclaimed tile possible, no guilt at all. Some tweaks or cool downs is needed here as it's a pretty brutal event even once, having it happen multiple times nearly in a row is just... not good.
19. More on events, this time some weirdness (bugs?). See below screenshot:
What is the "Harry Potter" event mentioned in the log? I noticed it scroll by on EoT, but I received no pop up or other notification of this event so I don't know if this was a good thing/bad thing or if I had a choice or anything really. I've seen this as well with a "dock workers in the ___ Empire have gone on strike" event that supposedly struck my empire, yet again no pop up or mention of this event beyond the line in the event log. Note that there is a "dock worker strike" event that gives a pop-up with 3 choices as I've seen that, but there appears to be a strike event where there is no pop-up or player notification/options as well. I searched in CIV4EventInfos.xml and can see that the events are there and from what I can see they give some turns of happiness, but in-game I've seen no info on them when they happen as mentioned. Some player feedback/info would be helpful for these events.
20. Events yet again, this time there appear to be an error on loading a sound file, possibly related to a specific event (wootz steel):
<Type>EVENT_CRUCIBLE_STEEL_1</Type>
<Description>TXT_KEY_EVENT_CRUCIBLE_STEEL_1</Description>
This *may* have been from a game on beta2, as the screenshot is far back enough that I may have still been on that rather than the SVN. If this no longer applies to current SVN releases feel free to ignore, otherwise just letting you know there may be an error with this event.
21. Events again one more time - yes I know, what can I say there were a lot of little issues and problems that I noticed over the course of many games. Anyways, the below screenshot is an event that gives proper notification as it should, yet the "bad" choice gives no pop up info or bad consequence of choosing it. You can just select it and nothing happens as far as I can see. I always take the gold hit as it's minor and I'm not sure picking the other would cause a glitch of some kind.
22. Can anything be done with the AI and it's building patterns/choices for cities? They are really, really suboptimal the vast majority of the time, cities 1 tile off of rivers, 1 tile off of ocean access, built right on top of resources which is a bad choice 95% of the time (you can't tell me they can't see hidden resources as well, cities built right on top of oil in the ancient era and so on, sigh) and other odd crap where cities are far too close when 1 tile over would be better or too far away where there is tons of useable tiles even with larger 3-ring cities. Not sure this can be edited or altered by modders or if this is hard-coded behavior but it makes taking over AI cities and empires a raze-and-replace situation nearly all the time aside from captials.
23. More AI programming "issues" - see screenshot below, note the workers building a farm right on the border:
Ok, now realize that I'm at war with France on that border and then you can see why I'm raging at those workers. This is something I consider a bug in the vanilla BtS game that was never fixed - workers should NEVER EVER go near an active war zone/border, I don't care if they're on auto, or pathing, or need need need to build something sooo bad omg just let me build something on that unimproved tile already please... -> just stop it already. Don't go there ya dumb horsehockys, you will die to the single horse unit the AI always keeps handy for just such situations where the stupid workers in the game pull this crap.
This is not strictly a RoM or AND issue as I've mentioned as I used to see this in regular non-modded games but I'd love if it could somehow be fixed in this mod. If it's not possible to do this I understand, just hopeful that this is something that is within the editing power currently available.
24. Weirdness again when it comes to borders and culture during wars, perhaps due to realistic culture spread as well? In any case, why don't I control that river plains hill tile with a mine on it north of Tours? I didn't control it when Tours was a French city, now that it's my city and France has no other city they own near it (at least 4 plus tiles away), I STILL don't control the tile. WTF I say to that, how do they still have control of that tile?
25. The difference in spread of tech discovery for the various road/travel building techs is a bit off for me. Cart paths are early and largely useless aside from resource hookups, that's fine. Roads come in at Monarchy, alright a bit later than I'd care for but mostly ok as well. But then paved roads come in nearly right away at Construction. This is too soon, I've barely built any roads but the most essential by the time they are obsolete. Heck in my last game I built 5 *tiles* of road in my entire 10 city empire before I realized how close I was to PR and just suffered without any road connections until PR came in.
Then once you're done with PR, the next one is railroads a long way off in the industrial era at the tech of the same name, but again fairly soon after they are available you have electric railroads come in at Electronics where you have to do over your entire empire again for at best minimal gains, 10/turn vs 12/turn is minor. Spread things out a bit more I'd say, especially PR - make them available with Engineering like they used to be is my suggestion. Similar spacing for the later travel build techs, spread out a bit more so each one gets some use before becoming obsolete.
26. I love how buildings now tell you how much they'll "actually" give you when it comes to hammers, food and so on when using this mod. However, I am confused sometimes why it will tell you a building will give you a benefit that is not obvious from it's given abilities such as Military buildings like the military airbase and garrison do for production. Others do it to, such as the Laboratory, see screenshot below:
I originally thought it was factoring in potential specialists you may or may not assign but aside from how it shouldn't do that, that doesn't explain the military buildings that don't give specialist possibilities. Is it factoring civics and multipliers for unit production? It's a bit confusing and not obvious how it's determining you'll get an "actual" benefit from buildings sometimes.
27. Part of the balancing effort for this mod was in alterations to how tech diffuses as I understand it. This is a good idea in theory, but in practice what happens is that if you're playing a continents type map, one continent with the super player on it, that being the human that knows how to work the system with all the new changes and improvements, this continent will zoom out ahead of the others until ocean contact opens up. You get annoyances like all religions and guilds founded on your continent and nothing on the other two because your continent is teching like mad from your empire and the other AIs leeching off of you.
Just abandoned another game with this mod for this very reason as my continent had founded all but 1 religion in the world. Stupid little former barb Civs (with REV on) form single city countries with 5 and 6 pop and 10 turns later they're founding religions due to tech leeching off me and the other established AIs. Not good, and I'm not sure how it could be fixed really.
28. Some traits in this mod both modded and original seem to again be objectively "better" than the other trait options. Deciever for example is very very weak, where as Agricultural is just wow, I mean really OP from my games experience. I abandoned a game I had going with Atotoztli in the medivial era awhile back as I was just completely stomping on the AIs in that game, what a strong trait. Charismatic also seems very strong, it of course is very good in the base game vanilla BTS as well, but in this mod with fractional xp rewards on cutting xp unit promotion reqs by 25% is even more powerful. Some ajustments and/or balancing seems needed in this area at some point. Not saying the ones I mentioned need nerfing, but buffing up some of the other seemingly "lesser" traits may be worth looking at.
29. Are minor/barb civs able to complete wonders? Or perhaps the question should really be "should they be able to" as they clearly can do so based on this screenshot:
I'm not sure how I feel about this really, although it did strike me as odd that a minor civ that is at war with everyone and would struggle just to survive without being swallowed up by an established empire within 100 turns of being "born" decided that building a wonder was the proper build strategy for it to choose. Perhaps just a very unlikely one-off chance occurance but it was a bit odd to me.
A final note here on balance when it comes to the AI - until you can teach it do things like this:
it's a lost cause I fear. Or at the very least it's a severly uphill battle. There are so many ways to power up your empire with all the new options, human players are just going to leave the AI in the dust once they grasp the finer points of the mod and learn how to exploit them to best effect. I sincerly wish you the best of luck in your balancing efforts, but you may be at it a while longer as in my experience the AI just doesn't understand how useful and "must have right now" and "higher priority than anything else" certain techs and buildings for various cities and game situations there are with this mod active that just didn't exist in the base game.
So that's it for now I think. Keep in mind, nothing here is a demand or something that "must be done", these are observations and requests for discussion and possible change if the change is feasible and popular/requested enough. Comments on anything here are welcome.